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Re: yeah that was pretty much what I was going to say by laudablepuss 07/24/2004, 1:56am PDT
Fullofkittens wrote:

FABIO wrote:



The movie is set in 2035, which is stupid considering how hi-tech everything is. I thought the public got over the "everything will be so advanced iand futuristic in just 20 years" back in 80's time travel movies. Was it just because that's the year the book was set in?


No, because the book is a collection of short stories that are set, IIRC, all the way from the late 90's to the middle of the 21st century.

The film is not based on the book in any meaningful way.

IMDB Trivia wrote:

The movie originally started as a screenplay entitled "Hardwired", a classical-style murder mystery that read like a stage play, and was very much in the spirit of Asimov's "three laws" mysteries. When the original "Hardwired" script eventually reached Fox, after being developed at Disney with director Bryan Singer, new director Alex Proyas and writer Jeff Vintar opened up the story to fit a big budget studio film. When Fox acquired the rights to Isaac Asimov's story collection, Vintar spent two years adapting "Hardwired" to serve as a tenth story in the Asimov canon, complete with Susan Calvin and the Three Laws of Robotics. Writer Akiva Goldsman came on late in the process to tailor the script to Will Smith.


If it's supposed to be the "10th story," they should have read the first nine. Every single one of the stories describes Susan Calvin as an ugly man-hater that could only relate to robots. One of the stories is actually *about* the fact that she never managed to attract a human being.




And Will Smith's wise-cracking cop character appears to be even more one dimensional and cliched than Asimov's much-maligned characters.

It's pretty fucking hard to get past the fact that the movie's message is directly opposite the message in all of Asimov's robot stories partly because it's named after a collection of those stories and partly because Hollywood appears incapable of making a sci-fi movie involving some great new invention or inovation that DOESN'T go Frankenstein. Even Spider-Man 2 has a little bit of this: machines with AI? Of course they're evil. But most important of all, the entire point of the Three Laws was to refute this idea that technology will must necessarily run amok. Dangerous machines can be built, but machines can also be built with safeguards to prevent accidents.

I'm guessing that their rationale for having the robots run around killing people is by narrowly defining the definition of "human" such that most people can be killed but the villain and his buddies are safe. Am I right? (If I'm not, you can ignore the rest of this paragraph.) Asimov did do a book with this idea but there were two caveats: first, he was trying to reconcile his Empire books with his Robot books, and since there were no Robots in the Empire or Foundation books, he had to find a reason for humanity to ditch them. Too bad he didn't include them in those books in the first place. Second, by the time Susan Calvin died, robot brains were so advanced and had the Three Laws so thoroughly ingrained that it would have been a tremendous undertaking (Asimov assures us) to develop a simillarly advanced brain with a siginificant change in the Laws. So when it happens in Robots and Empire, it's been done by a planet reknowned for it's gifted roboticists (and insane xenophobia) . . . the only people who could manage such a feat.

I don't expect anyone to care about this and if you liked the movie, that's great. But there's no chance that I could watch this movie and enjoy it.
PREVIOUS NEXT REPLY QUOTE
 
I, Robot is pretty decent summer entertainment by FABIO 07/21/2004, 1:45pm PDT NEW
    Fucking liar. NT by Borges 07/21/2004, 1:58pm PDT NEW
    Well, If You're Not Going To Do It, I Will. by Rightbug 07/23/2004, 12:18pm PDT NEW
        yeah that was pretty much what I was going to say by FABIO 07/23/2004, 5:50pm PDT NEW
            Re: yeah that was pretty much what I was going to say by Fullofkittens 07/23/2004, 9:29pm PDT NEW
                Re: yeah that was pretty much what I was going to say by laudablepuss 07/24/2004, 1:56am PDT NEW
                    Re: yeah that was pretty much what I was going to say by FABIO 07/24/2004, 2:08am PDT NEW
                        I take one bit back by FABIO 07/24/2004, 2:13am PDT NEW
                        Re: yeah that was pretty much what I was going to say by laudablepuss 07/24/2004, 2:14am PDT NEW
                    Re: yeah that was pretty much what I was going to say by Mysterio 07/25/2004, 10:46pm PDT NEW
    review of the previews by FABIO 07/24/2004, 2:46am PDT NEW
        one more by FABIO 07/26/2004, 1:59am PDT NEW
            Fucking Liar II by Borges 07/28/2004, 1:04am PDT NEW
                Invalidated by FABIO 07/28/2004, 3:20am PDT NEW
                    Ad Hominem you moron by Borges 07/28/2004, 10:08am PDT NEW
                    Re: Invalidated by Borges 07/28/2004, 10:18am PDT NEW
 
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